I say this
as a member of the Vietnam-era generation that was touched so
deeply by Mr. McCarthy, and that does not mean that all of us
saw him as a saint or even as a plausible president. But by challenging
Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968,
McCarthy did something no American politician has done since.
He made every voter think hard about complicated questions of
war and peace, of engagement and isolation, of patriotism and
treason.
But for me,
Mr. McCarthy's death triggered complex memories about another
important issue altogether. It drew me back to the first difficult
question about press bias that I encountered -- an episode that
marked me as no other ever has. I hope you will permit this digression
so that, in relating the story to you, I might sort out my own
thoughts about it. (The truth is that the very process of writing
is the process of thinking.)
The incident
at the heart of this story took place almost a quarter-century
ago. I was a 27-year-old reporter with The New York Times,
and former Sen. McCarthy was 65, in rusticated semi-retirement
in an 18th-century farmhouse at the end of Holim Hollow in Woodville,
Va. I drove down there to see the man, who was toiling at an electric
typewriter before a great stone fireplace but was thinking about
running for the Senate again. I wrote a piece that I thought was
pretty innocuous and then I moved on to the next thing.
But one reader
of the newspaper did not think the piece was at all innocuous,
and that was A.M. Rosenthal, the formidable executive editor.
In a few days time I received a remarkable letter from him --
both the word "letter" and the earlier phrase "electric
typewriter" prove that this happened a very long time ago
-- and let me summarize by saying that Mr. Rosenthal was not at
all happy with me.
He thought
the piece "rather starry-eyed and overly enchanted,"
and in a remarkable way he taught me the most important lesson
I have ever learned in journalism. Later I would quarrel with
Mr. Rosenthal, and though my career was shaped by that quarrel,
in some ways I was affected far more by the lesson he taught me
in his critique of my McCarthy piece, in which I wrote that the
Minnesota Democrat had a reputation of being "something of
a mystic and a maverick."
Mr. Rosenthal's
remarks are worth quoting at some length:
"I do
not like pieces that are harsh and vindictive. By the very nature
of news, we have to cause people pain. I don't think we should
cause them pain unnecessarily, simply for the sake of a phrase
or because we have the power to do so. ... At the same time, I
do not think that we should be unnecessarily admiring or give
the impression that we are maudlin or in love with our subjects."
I do not
fully agree with Mr. Rosenthal's critique, because I wasn't in
love with Mr. McCarthy and in fact had not supported him in 1968.
I did not think then, and I do not think now, that McCarthy was
a great man, but I did think, and still believe, that he was a
man of great importance.
But this
column is only partly about what I said about Mr. McCarthy. It's
mostly about what Mr. Rosenthal said to me. Here's another excerpt:
"I am
not looking for antiseptic reporting or stories that balance every
word of praise with a word of criticism -- or vice versa. ...
What we are trying to achieve is a tone in the paper's entirety,
and story by story, that is witty and sophisticated, literate
and -- above all -- fair. There is fairness to the subject, which
is paramount, and there is fairness to the reader."
I so ingested
his letter that now, as an editor myself, obsessively concerned
with bias, I have on probably hundreds of occasions spoken those
very words to others. Some of you parents out there may be nodding
knowingly, amused at how many times the phrases of your own parents
have tumbled effortlessly from your own lips to your children's
ears, so convinced are you of their utter truth.
We are accused,
in this paper and in others around the country, of being biased
-- in the way we write about people and issues and in the images
we use to illustrate them -- and all of us have ways of responding
to that criticism. Often we do what I am still doing about a piece
I wrote in 1981 -- hesitating to see how another person's view
might be right, even if we do not share the precise bias that
we are accused of holding.
Mr. McCarthy's
death made me reflect on a lot of things, like whether some of
us were wrong to support the way he attacked his own government,
or whether others of us were wrong not to see that in some cases
patriotism requires dissent. Those are questions for McCarthy's
time as much as they are for President Bush's.
But Mr. McCarthy's
death also made me think ever more deeply about the bias questions
that were emerging in the 1980s and that have reached full flower
today -- and to realize how much I learned from a man I disagreed
with and whom I didn't like. It's time I thanked him.
